Sudden death. We see it every day in the emergency room, the ICU, on the trauma service. A patient comes in and no matter what we do we are going to lose him within minutes or maybe hours. What we do next could have a lifelong impact on that patient’s survivors. But why? Our patient […]

My first book, What Do We Tell the Children? Talking to Kids About Death and Dying is now available everywhere through Abingdon Press. Click HERE to purchase on Amazon. The book is filled with stories about children who are grieving, healing, tools for how to support kids, and our need for a cultural change around […]

Reviewer Cheryl Wright-Watkins has kind things to say about At the End of Life: As expected given the subject matter, this collection contains an ample amount of sadness. But these writers deftly use details, metaphor, and lyricism to create art instead of sentimentality. To read the full review, visit NewPages.

Last week I spent a fair amount of time on the phone with the media. A few nights prior to my conversations, two teenage boys went onto a lake to go ice fishing. They both fell through and drowned. As the community grieved these painful deaths, they community members waited on the shore of the […]

Theresa Brown, a contributor to In Fact Books’ forthcoming I Wasn’t Strong Like This: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse, reflects on end-of-life decisions at the New York Times’ “Well” blog. She writes about a nurse, Amy, who in 2010 received a diagnosis of Stage 4 inflammatory breast cancer and opted for quality of life […]

We were struck by a recent New York Times article about Martha Keochareon, a nurse dying from pancreatic cancer, who invited students from her alma mater to her bedside: For Ms. Keochareon, this was a chance to teach something about the profession she had found late and embraced — she became a nurse at 40, […]

Those of us who labor in the techno-confused trenches of American medicine need little reminder of how the profit driven machine seems to ramp up the closer a person is to death. We’ve counted the twenty drips hung around the patient in ICU Bed 2, glittering and glowing like the control panel of a jet […]

"An impressive, meaningful, and often courageous chorus of voices tackling a once-taboo subject with dignity..."

-- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

"Truly gripping narratives that illuminate a hard truth about death in our culture: it is always so complicated, so much thornier than we think. ... [The] authors, and editor Lee Gutkind, deserve credit for being unsparingly honest about doctoring, about decision-making, about their own ambivalent emotions. They have a lot to teach us."